How To Reclaim A Derogatory Nickname, with Michael Egnor

The Novellatron1 - the skeptical, alien-made robot also known as Dr. Steven Novella - has many detractors in the worlds of pseudoscience and antiscience, but none that I would call his nemesis: other than perhaps that of Dr. Michael Egnor, conservative Catholic neurosurgeon and ID proponent.�Hmm, then again, maybe “nemesis” is too strong a word, and one that gives too much credit to Egnor. But he does seem to be the one person that keeps coming back for more slices of Novellatron pie, time after time, as unwise as that is.

Despite his fierce Internet battles with the Novellatron over dualism, neuroscience and, of course, intelligent design/evolution, Egnor never had a website of his own, instead using the resources of the Discovery Institute’s main blog, Evolution News & Views. Until now, of course.

So, I give to you: Egnorance. Yes, that is its name (and don’t worry about it wearing out). It has to be the single boldest attempt at derogatory nickname-reclaiming I’ve ever witnessed, based purely on the fact that the term can’t really be anything but a pun revolving around how ignorant Egnor is about many of the topics he passionately defends. He’s too conservative and middle-aged to be a hipster, so the ironic angle doesn’t work either. How perplexing.

Anyway, he’s in sparkling form over there, throwing out posts with rather alarming speed. (The speed almost gets me thinking about how he could possibly be keeping up with his professional career in surgery.) The usual topics are covered, including atheism, evolution, abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change: it’s all as you would expect from a pro-ID, arch-conservative Catholic.

I won’t talk in detail about anything he says (even though I easily could - there’s just so much to choose from!), lest I provoke his wrath and he writes something about me. Then again, would that be such a bad thing after all?

As wacko has the Egnorant One’s posts were on the DI website, on his own he has become completely unhinged. The man has no respect for facts or evidence.
Is Michael Egnor still a DI shill, or is he out on his own full-time?

Still, Egnor’s blog posts are a wonderful source of hilarity. A couple of his acolytes are actually dumber than he is, so that just adds to the general sense of
frivolity.

As wacko has the Egnorant One’s posts were on the DI website, on his own he has become completely unhinged. The man has no respect for facts or evidence.
Is Michael Egnor still a DI shill, or is he out on his own full-time?

Still, Egnor’s blog posts are a wonderful source of hilarity. A couple of his acolytes are actually dumber than he is, so that just adds to the general sense of
frivolity.

And of course the funniest thing about this is that he doesn’t understand just how hilarious he is! Guess he needs some kind of emotional release after spending hours in the operating room and teaching obnoxious medical students.

An atheist must argue that morality is wholly subjective, because if God does not exist, there is no source for moral law except for men’s opinions. This question is a defeater for atheism, because if atheism is true it renders all human relations merely relations of power, devoid of any objective obligations (honesty, non-violence, respect, etc). Even an atheist would deny that.

[Long omitted section]

When I first became a Christian, I feared rational refutation. I feared that there was a strong argument to be made against belief in God. I am no longer afraid. I am astonished at the weakness of the atheist arguments, not least on the question of the objectivity of moral law.

Of course the Moral Law is objective. Atheism is a willfully ignorant ideology.

What a contemptible liar he is! Actually, religion cannot be the source of objective morals either, precisely because they must still come from a God that can change them at any time. If morals were indeed objective and absolute, they couldn’t be changed even if God wanted to change them, and they would still remain even if there were no God. Egnor hasn’t so much argued against atheism as much as he has made himself look profoundly stupid!

An atheist must argue that morality is wholly subjective, because if God does not exist, there is no source for moral law except for men’s opinions. This question is a defeater for atheism, because if atheism is true it renders all human relations merely relations of power, devoid of any objective obligations (honesty, non-violence, respect, etc).

Egnor is right - up to a point. If there is no way to ground ‘ought’ in ‘is’ then all morality is subjective. But that’s as far as it goes. What he fails to point out is that the same criticism must also apply to God’s moral prescriptions. What makes His moral judgments any better than yours or mine? In fact, a lot of people would argue that, based on the evidence of the Bible - in particular the Old Testament, His judgments were a lot worse than ours. The fact that He is assumed to know a lot more than we do about the Universe makes no difference since we just agreed that ‘ought’ cannot be grounded in ‘is’. As for the claim of omnibenevolence, that is flatly contradicted by the OT accounts of His behavior.

In fact, what Egnor cannot admit is that the Biblical evidence for the existence of God is also the “defeater” for Christian claims about the nature of God.

Paul Burnett said:
That BS sure makes me glad I’m not a philosopher or a theologian.

Come now, Hume is dynamite.

However, though I am inclined to turn a blind eye to the eccentricities of religion, one of the lines I draw is is at theology. “Look, if you want to believe things on faith, there’s not much I can say about it, but faith by definition implies neither logic nor evidence – since if you had those things faith wouldn’t be required.”

Egnor: An atheist must argue that morality is wholly subjective, because if God does not exist, there is no source for moral law except for men’s opinions.

Sure there is: our values, instincts, and desires. And while these may not give us nice and simple solutions to all problems, they are sufficient to enable us to have gotten along for the last 200,000 years or so. To hear this idiotic argument from Egnor, one would think human beings were purely theoretical constructs instead of actual beings with an actual history of doing just fine with our subjective morals, complete with respecting the obligations Egnor claims don’t exist, and often with far better results than those who claim to have objective morals.

This argument more than any other can be defeated simply by attacking the basic premises. We don’t need objective morals, nor do we have to be able to defend the morals we have with any sort of objective rigid argument. Egnor’s argument is completely contentless blather.

Of course the Moral Law is objective. Atheism is a willfully ignorant ideology.

Aw geez this old gag. I like to come back and talk about traffic regulations. I mean, if there wasn’t an absolute basis for traffic regulations, wouldn’t anyone drive any way they felt like it? They’d just drive on either side of the street!

And so that argues for the existence of Kop, the god of traffic regulations.

There’s also the argument of comedy for the existence of the Hindu Monkey God Hanuman – one of the more popular of the Vedic gods, being unusual among gods in having a sense of fun – but that can be left as a exercise for the reader.

Is Egnor really responsible for the page? Maybe Egnor is going to use this blog to claim that he only wrote all the material supporting the intelligent design creationist scam to demonstrate how intellectually and morally bankrupt the whole operation was.

Of course the Moral Law is objective. Atheism is a willfully ignorant ideology

Of course Moral Law is not objective. If it were,it would be true for all times and all places. Are you arguing that it is still morally justified to stone to death rebellious children and adultresses?

And atheism is a willfully skeptical position as distinct from a willfully credulous position.

Right. The old - there must be a god otherwise how could be possibly know how to behave - routine. Nonsense.

The same logic has been applied to government. If there is no god than the government cannot derive the right to rule from god, therefore there must be a god, otherwise how could we ever figure out a decent form of government.

Look, if you want to abdicate the responsibility for designing a working government or a rational moral code, go right ahead. But don’t use that as an argument for the existence of god. That’s just a lazy cop out. And if you don’t want to bother to learn any science, that’s fine. Natural selection will still act on you whether you understand it or not. Just don’t try to use that as an excuse for lying to everyone else about science. That would be egnorance. Seems like a pretty silly position for a physician, but there you have it.

One of the interesting less-obvious aspects to absolute morality is that it tends to reinforce the naturalistic fallacy.

After all, if there is an absolute morality to the Universe, then it should be reflected in the laws of nature. Unfortunately, it’s hard to think of any way to interpret that except as an endorsement of Social Darwinism – a notion that creationists are not going to like AT ALL.

When I think of “absolute standards of right and wrong” (or truth and falsehood) I mean standards that are equally applicable to all people, whatever their race, religion, color, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or social class, without any double standard or discrimination whatsoever. THAT I can believe in and do insist on, but sadly most people who say they accept it only give lip service to that ideal and then egnor it (pun intended) otherwise!

There is, of course, the possibility that Egnor’s God does not endorse warmongering, murder, or egomania, since it would appear that Egnor himself does not, whatever the latter’s views on evolution.

God appears to be protean, which is alone an argument against believing in Him. It passes belief that Egnor’s God is the same as, say, either Fred Phelp’s on the one hand or Martin Neimoller’s on the other. You might recall that Neimoller was the German who said, loud and clear, that God wasn’t with the Nazis, and ended up dying in a concentration camp for it. Maybe there’s something in the Jewish idea that God is the Ultimate. The Ultimate what? Everything.

In which case, God is also the Ultimate Self-contradiction. Well, if I am large and contain multitudes, what is He?

Bob, you need to be more clear. Egnor and his acolytes don’t know that “Gott mit uns” was on every German WWII army belt buckle.
In fact, I have one of those belt buckles here on my desk.

My father had one of those, too. That’s how I knew about it. He took it from a Nazi officer who eagerly surrendered to that American corporal so that it wouldn’t be the Russians who got him. That officer was a functionary at one of the small slave-labor concentration camps. My father had nightmares (literally) for the rest of his life about the people that he couldn’t save from that camp because they were in such a state of advanced starvation.

And that real nightmare was created by folks with God on their side, doing His work. Or so they claimed, and many probably believed.

A historical note: the motto ‘Gott mit uns” on German Army belts had featured since at least the First World War and I read somewhere (but can’t verify) that the tradition goes back to the Prussian army before unification. In short, it wasn’t a Nazi innovation, though that doesn’t take anything from the incongruity (to put it mildly) of it in the context of WWII.

Regarding absolute morality, it’s surprising how closely it resembles the prejudices and predilections of those proposing it.

bplurt said:
Regarding absolute morality, it’s surprising how closely it resembles the prejudices and predilections of those proposing it.

Funny how dat works, isn’t it?

One of the broader problems with the notion of absolute morality is the open question of just how moral humans are. It is hardly even cynical to observe that morality is often subject to self-serving interpretation, and that people who wear their morality on their sleeves are generally seen as up to no good.

Interesting article, particularly in pointing out that the Waffen SS didn’t use that motto. AFAIK, anyone joining the SS had to renounce membership in a church. The Nazi regime had no problems invoking the gods as justification, but it did not like the idea of any competing source of authority; it was happy with churches if they supported Nazi policy.

I have heard that Hitler rather liked the idea of Japanese State Shinto: a religion under the control of the state that promoted the policies of the state. State Shinto was one of the first things the Allied occupation authorities shut down in Japan – “Shinto Directive” of 15 December 1945
or “ABOLITION OF GOVERNMENTAL SPONSORSHIP, SUPPORT, PERPETUATION, CONTROL AND DISSEMINATION OF STATE SHINTO”.

What I found fascinating was the list of blurbs about his blog down the right side. There wasn’t a single positive one - he’s picked a selection of the most scathingly negative comments available. I assume he wears them as a badge of pride. Which is fine by me, if he wants to glory in his stupidity.

mrg said: State Shinto was one of the first things the Allied occupation authorities shut down in Japan – “Shinto Directive” of 15 December 1945 or “ABOLITION OF GOVERNMENTAL SPONSORSHIP, SUPPORT, PERPETUATION, CONTROL AND DISSEMINATION OF STATE SHINTO”.

Thinking far ahead, we need to start revising that document for the Post-Dominionist Theocracy phase of American government that will be upon us if the rethuglicans have their way.